Dance Me Through
by Ssergit
Summary: A few weeks after the final battle, Harry sits with Ginny and they plan their far future together. Harry wants to place the memory of her expression in a vial, save it for when they're old and grey and she asks him if he still loves her.


**note: **for HappyHouri and the other lovers of Hinny on my discord chat. Love you guys!

* * *

Two weeks after what people have started calling the Battle of Hogwarts, Harry snags a seat beside Ginny in the living room at the Burrow. The Weasley home has become a sort of de-facto meeting place for a lot of the remaining Order of the Phoenix and DA students. Harry was initially worried about what the effect would be on Molly, having her house be a kind of 'grief central,' but he'd read about the effects of war before, and he's seeing it, here. Everyone that comes to the Burrow just _understands_ without being told that it's a place where a lot of people are struggling to be okay with being alive.

He's one of them.

The weird thing is that despite his role in the fight, despite the _Daily Prophet_ headlines and the people who have come up to him in public and wept or hurrahed at him, Harry has been treated like everyone else, here. That the people he loves most are spending their time at the Burrow too is almost secondary to this. He's grateful for being just one of the crowd here so much that he wishes _desperately_ that he could talk to someone about it, but talking about it would shine wand light on something he wants to keep happening. A couple of times in the past week Harry's burst out laughing about the look on Rita Skeeter's face if she knew there were so many interviewable people just _wandering around_ in this house she will never be welcome in.

Ginny's warmth beside him gives him life, today. It always does, but something about it today is so powerful that his eyes prick with tears when he looks over at her. She's talking with Luna; her face is animated with joy about whatever they're talking about, and he wants to interrupt and tell her in a thousand word speech how much he really, really loves her. But he doesn't. He holds it in, the feeling of nearly bursting with energy oddly similar to his duel with Voldemort, of all things. That leaves him breathless, that memory, until Harry realizes that he'd been holding his breath, and the black spots swimming in front of his eyes are from his own romantic stupidity, not his memories of Voldemort.

That's when Ginny turns to look at him fondly, the exact moment when he lets out all the air he'd been holding in one big rush. She turns and smiles, the love that Ron wishes wasn't there written plainly on her face, and Harry tries to smile in the middle of his air blowing and he can feel how moronic he must look. Her expression of fondness doesn't diminish, though.

"Too much thinking, not enough breathing," she tells him with an amused quirk of her lips, before turning back to Luna.

Harry wants to place the memory of that expression in a vial, save it for when they're old and grey and she asks him if he still loves her. He's _certain_ that this particular expression of hers is baked in, and he'd be able to compare each preserved instance of it, year after year, intrinsically Ginny.

When Luna is called away to speak to someone else, Ginny turns to him and says, "Hey."

"Hey," Harry says, remembering when responding like that had felt like a misstep instead of shorthand for ten things unsaid.

"Do you ever look at yourself in the mirror and you're surprised there's no grey in your hair?" she asks him in a rush, as if she's a bit ashamed of the question but wanted to ask him anyway. She pulls up a knee and holds onto it with her clasped hands, and expands on the question. "I'm not saying I feel aged, after all that," and here Ginny waves a hand, dismissing two decades of conflict in a single gesture. "I feel like we've skipped ahead, and I'm forty already, and this was all a nightmare of events that really happened ages ago."

Harry thinks about it before he answers her. "Sort of? It feels like it just happened yesterday and it happened twenty years of marriage ago, if that's what you mean."

Her eyebrow arches up with the smile on her lip like they're connected. "Is that a proposal?"

"Yes," he says without an iota of hesitation. "Eventually? At some appropriate point in the future that won't leave us hearing about how impatient and young we were when we decided?"

Ginny was sitting there with her fingers over her lips and her eyes wide, but the longer he talked, the more the corners of her eyes crinkled with amusement.

"I could have kept going, you know," he says in response to the expression on her face.

"I would have let you."

He knows she expects him to change the subject now, because they're in a room full of people who could overhear them, but the bit of pink on her cheeks and the love in her eyes goads him just enough.

"We'll wait till maybe another year, maybe two? Long enough that your mum starts to make comments, you know the ones," he says, leaning his shoulder against the back of the couch, still facing her. She leans back too, and they reach for each other's hands at the same time. Harry continues his description, rubbing his thumb along her empty ring finger as he does so. "Maybe the _Daily Prophet_ runs a story, 'No War Bride for Potter,' we wait so long."

"Mum starts hanging sheer curtains that look just enough like a veil," Ginny suggests. "She'll leave books of recipes out open to wedding cakes 'by accident.'"

Harry loved the mischief he could see in her eyes. Ordinarily if they'd been sitting all cuddled up by this, someone would have come over and disturbed them by now, but it seemed they were in their own little bubble, for once. Ginny turns her hand sideways and laces their fingers together.

"You know what we should do? Wait long enough till someone makes a bet. Then we can snoop about what it is, set the date with an accomplice, and rake in our winnings," she tells him. Despite their bodies snuggled up next to each other, when she says this, she's looking away as if surveying the room. The effect is that of a hard-nosed gangster plot of some sort, all spoken out of the side of her mouth, and Harry is delighted.

When Ginny turns back to him, though, there are tears in her eyes, and he knows why. That would have been something the twins would have done. _Together._

"I think I like _then_ way more than _now,"_ she tells him, the strain of keeping her tone steady causing her voice to crack on the last word.

"Me too," Harry said.

Ginny tucks her head under his chin, and Harry thinks, to hell with it, he's going to sit here and snuggle her and if Ron gives him crap for it, so be it. He says just one more thing, before letting the murmured voices in the room wash over them like rain.

"I'm glad I have you now, though."

Her pleased hum resonates in his chest, and he closes his eyes and pictures their future together.


End file.
